Back!

The title’s a double entendre. I’m back after ten days, and my back, which I severely screwed up by sitting and writing 60 hours a week, is also (after a nice course of steroids and cyclobenzaprine) back.

Bipedalism (or in the case of sitting upright, bibunism) is not for the unintelligently designed.

I finished the humor chapter, including some of the fantastic suggestions y’all gave me. In fact, there’s so much good stuff there that it’s going to leak over to a grab-bag section at the end of the book, not to mention my Netflix queue and bedside bookshelf.

Becca’s proofing every chapter before I submit, and a headline from the Onion in the humor chapter absolutely slew her yesterday — a joke that’s as close to perfect as I can imagine:

Sumerians Look On In Confusion As God Creates World

I’m just now finishing up a chapter on getting the best of religion without the bad — all that community and social connectedness and collective do-gooding I’ve written about before. Also diving into the aforementioned grab-bag — specifically a chapter called “Ten Surprising Things about Atheists and Other Nonbelievers,” or something like that. And once again, I keep running into Canada.

It’s devilishly hard to measure religious disbelief in Canada because 33 percent of Canadian Catholics and 28 percent of Canadian Protestants also say they don’t believe in God.* Most survey questions will pick up “Catholic” or “Anglican” without then saying, “If it wouldn’t be too much trouble, do you mind if I ask whether your Catholicism or Anglicanism includes…how shall I put this delicately…God?” So it’s safe to say that religious disbelief is massively, massively undercounted in Canada.

I think it is definitely undercounted, it all depends on how the question is asked, e.g. on the census in Ireland last year it was “Religion” which included “other – please state” in which case some people wrote atheist or agnostic… then below that an option for “no religion” . Very confusing!

I also read a study showing that similarly to Canada, many people in the Nordic countries identify as being a part of the national religion without actually believing in god. (Sundback, 2007, Membership of Nordic ‘National’ Churches as a
‘Civil Religious’ Phenomenon)